A UN Treaty Guarantees Youth Rights Everywhere on Earth — Except the US

Environmental activist Greta Thunberg, along with climate activist Alexandria Villasenor and friends, protest at the UN headquarters in New York City on September 6, 2019.EuropaNewswire / Gado / Getty Images

Fifteen kids from a dozen countries, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, recently brought a formal complaint to the United Nations. They’re arguing that climate change violates children’s rights as guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a global agreement.

By petitioning the U.N. on behalf of the world’s children, their action made history. But it’s not the first time that kids have turned to this international accord in pursuit of social change.

As I explain in my book, The Kids Are in Charge, the Convention on the Rights of the Child isn’t just a legal document. It also sends kids an important message: that they matter, that their voices are important and that they deserve to be heard. When countries join this agreement, which took effect in 1990, they pledge to work toward aligning their own laws with its principles.

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Banning Corporal Punishment

The convention formally recognizes children as people with universal human rights and specific rights because of their age. It reflects a shift away from seeing children entirely as the possessions of their parents to treating them as individuals with equal rights and their own interests.

Many countries have taken action to promote children’s rights and well-being based in part on its mandate. For example, South Africa recently became the 57th country to prohibit corporal punishment — any act intended to cause pain or discomfort, such as paddling and spanking — in all settings, including schools and homes.

In fact, the U.S. is the only country that has refused to embrace the world’s most-ratified human rights agreement. It has 196 signatories including all of the U.N. member states except the U.S. plus some U.N. observers and non-members, such as Palestine, the Holy See and the South Pacific territories of Cook Islands and Niue.

Empowering Kids to Advocate for Kids

Kids and their communities don’t necessarily have to know about the legal details of the treaty to embrace the idea of children’s rights and make it their own.

According to a report from the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s University Belfast and Save the Children International, a humanitarian nonprofit, it can also motivate kids to stand up for themselves and to defend their peers in the face of discrimination, violence or other rights violations.

A boy I’ll call Diego, for example, told me that knowing about the convention gave him the confidence to go to his school principal and complain about a teacher who was being verbally abusive toward students. Because of his involvement in an organization that talks about children’s rights, he told me he “knew about my right to a quality education, and I knew that we, the students, could defend that right.”

Meanwhile, British kids are drawing on the convention in their campaign to lower the fees for citizenship applications. At more than 1,000 British pounds — roughly equal to US$1,300 — fees are so high that some British-born children who are eligible for citizenship, and would otherwise become citizens, don’t apply.

Children in India have used the convention to persuade their local governments to create children’s councils, where kids could be heard by adult political leaders. In the council in the small village of Keradi, children were concerned about alcoholism in their community because they saw it contributing to violence. They raised awareness of the problem and successfully pushed the local government to shut down unlicensed alcohol vendors.

Trying Children and Teens as Adults

If the U.S. were to finally ratify this convention, it could lead to changes in some national, state and local laws.

Because the international agreement encourages governments to include children’s voices in decisions that affect them, I believe that ratification would support efforts by U.S. kids to address the social, environmental and legal problems they care about most. Young activists fighting to advance climate justice, end gun violence and increase racial equity would all have the convention behind them when they speak out.

Jessica Taft is an interdisciplinary youth studies scholar whose work focuses on the political lives of children and youth across the Americas, with an emphasis on youth activists and youth social movements. Her first book, Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (NYU 2011), is an ethnography of teenage girl activists in five cities in North and South America. She has recently completed a book on intergenerational relationships and age-based power in the Peruvian movement of working children, entitled The Kids are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children (NYU 2019). She has published articles on “girl power” discourses, girls’ organizations and ideas about the public sphere, peer-driven political socialization among activist youth, and youth activists’ conceptions of democracy, as well as an edited volume on youth citizenship and civic-political engagement.

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